Rome, and were by him hailed as angels. A law of so virtuous a king as Alfred ranks slaves with horses and oxen; and the chronicles of William of Malmesbury show that, in our mother country, there was once a cruel slave trade in whites. As we listen to this story, we shall be grateful again to that civilization which renders such outrages more and more impossible. "Directly opposite," he says,17 "to the Irish coast, there is a seaport called Bristol, the inhabitants of which frequently sent into Ireland to sell those people whom they had bought up throughout England. They exposed to sale maidens in a state of pregnancy, with whom they made a sort of mock marriage. There you might see with grief, fastened together by ropes, whole rows of wretched beings of both sexes, of elegant forms, and in the very bloom of youth—a sight sufficient to excite pity even in barbarians—daily offered for sale to the first purchaser. Accursed deed! infamous disgrace! that men, acting in a manner which brutal instinct alone would have forbidden, should sell into slavery their relations, nay, even their own offspring." From still another chronicler18 we learn that, when Ireland, in 1172, was afflicted with public calamities, the people, but chiefly the clergy, (præcipue clericorum,) began to reproach themselves, as well they might, believing that these evils were brought upon their country because, contrary to the right of Christian freedom, they had bought as slaves the English boys brought to them by the merchants; wherefore, it is said, the English slaves were allowed to depart in freedom.
As late as the thirteenth century, the custom prevailed on the continent of Europe to treat all captives, taken in war, as slaves. To this, poetry, as well as history, bears its testimony. Old Michael Drayton, in his story of the Battle of Agincourt, says of the French—
For knots of cord to every town they send,
The captived English that they caught to bind;
For to perpetual slavery they intend
Those that alive they on the field should find.
And Othello, in recounting his perils, exposes this custom, when he speaks
Of being taken by the insolent foe,
And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence.
It was also held lawful to enslave any infidel or person who did not receive the Christian faith. The early common law of England doomed heretics to the stake; the Catholic Inquisition did the same; and the laws of Oleron, the maritime code of the middle ages, treated them "as dogs," to be attacked and despoiled by all true believers. It appears that Philip le Bel of France, the son of St. Louis, in 1296, presented his brother Charles, Count of Valois, with a Jew, and that he paid Pierre de Chambly three hundred livres for another Jew; as if Jews were at the time chattels, to be given away, or bought.19 And the statutes of Florence, boastful of freedom, as late as 1415, expressly allowed republican citizens to hold slaves who were not of the Christian faith; Qui non sunt Catholicæ fidei et Christianæ.20 And still further, the comedies of Molière, L'Étourdi, Le Sicilien, L'Avare, depicting Italian usages not remote from his own day, show that, at Naples and Messina, even Christian women continued to be sold as slaves.
This hasty sketch, which brings us down to the period when Algiers became a terror to the Christian nations, renders it no longer astonishing that the barbarous states of Barbary—a part of Africa, the great womb of slavery—professing Mohammedanism, which not only recognizes slavery, but expressly ordains "chains and collars" to infidels,21 should maintain the traffic in slaves, particularly in Christians who denied the faith of the Prophet. In the duty of constant war upon unbelievers, and in the assertion of a right to the services or ransom of their captives, they followed the lessons of Christians themselves.
It is not difficult, then, to account for the origin of the cruel custom now under consideration. Its history forms our next topic.
II.
The Barbary States, after the decline of the Arabian power, were enveloped in darkness, rendered more palpable by the increasing light among the Christian nations. As we behold them in the fifteenth century, in the twilight of European civilization, they appear to be little more than scattered bands of robbers and pirates—"the land rats and water rats" of Shylock—leading the lives of Ishmaelites. Algiers is described by an early writer as "a den of sturdy thieves, formed into a body, by which, after a tumultuary sort, they govern;"22 and by still another writer, contemporary with the monstrosity which he exposes, as "the theatre of all cruelty and sanctuarie of iniquitie, holding captive, in miserable servitude, one hundred and twenty thousand Christians, almost all subjects of the King of Spaine."23 Their habit of enslaving prisoners, taken in war and in piratical depredations, at last aroused against these states the sacred animosities of Christendom. Ferdinand the Catholic, after the conquest of Granada, and while the boundless discoveries of Columbus, giving to Castile and Aragon a new world, still occupied his mind, found time to direct an expedition into Africa, under the military command of that great ecclesiastic, Cardinal Ximenes. It is recorded that this valiant soldier of the church, on effecting the conquest of Oran, in 1509, had the inexpressible satisfaction of liberating upwards of three hundred Christian slaves.24
The progress of the Spanish arms induced the government of Algiers to invoke assistance from abroad. At this time, two brothers, Horuc and Hayradin, the sons of a potter in the Island of Lesbos, had become famous as corsairs. In an age when the sword of the adventurer often carved a higher fortune than could be earned by lawful exertion, they were dreaded for their abilities, their hardihood, and their power. To them Algiers turned for aid. The corsairs left the sea to sway the land; or rather, with amphibious robbery, they took possession of Algiers and Tunis, while they continued to prey upon the sea. The name of Barbarossa, by which they are known to Christians, is terrible in modern history.25
With pirate ships they infested the seas, and spread their ravages along the coasts of Spain and Italy, until Charles the Fifth was aroused to undertake their overthrow. The various strength of his broad dominions was rallied in this new crusade. "If the enthusiasm," says Sismondi, "which armed the Christians at an earlier day, was nearly extinct, another sentiment, more rational and legitimate, now united the vows of Europe. The contest was no longer to reconquer the tomb of Christ, but to defend the civilization, the liberty, the lives, of Christians."26 A stanch body of infantry from Germany, the veterans of Spain and Italy, the flower of the Castilian nobility, the knights of Malta, with a fleet of near five hundred vessels, contributed by Italy, Portugal, and even distant Holland, under the command of Andrew Doria, the great sea officer of the age—the whole being under the immediate eye of the Emperor himself, with the countenance and benediction of the Pope, and composing one of the most complete armaments which the world had then seen—were directed upon Tunis. Barbarossa opposed them bravely, but with unequal forces. While slowly yielding to attack from without, his defeat was hastened by unexpected insurrection within. Confined in the citadel were many Christian slaves, who, asserting the rights of freedom, obtained a bloody emancipation, and turned its artillery against their former masters. The place yielded to the Emperor, whose soldiers soon surrendered themselves to the inhuman excesses of war. The blood of thirty thousand innocent inhabitants reddened his victory. Amidst these scenes of horror there was but one spectacle that afforded him any satisfaction. Ten thousand Christian slaves met him, as he entered the town, and falling on their knees, thanked him as their deliverer.27
